the new test: you'll own nothing and like it. [The Counter Hit #2]

What is a man?

A miserable little pile of podcasts?

But enough talk.

Actually, not enough talk,

because here's some more.

(Upbeat Music)

From emotional intelligence to street

fighter, poetry to nature, comic books to

other curious things,

and everything in between.

This is the internet show that asks, what

can this teach us about being human?

I'm your host, Sam Kirk.

Welcome to Team Human.

This is...

(Upbeat Music) The Counter Hit.

(Upbeat Music) (Crowd Cheering)

Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome,

ladies and gentlemen.

Welcome, welcome, welcome.

It is my absolute pleasure

to be here with you all today.

Ah, it's so good to

see and hear all of you.

I mean, I can't hear you.

I'm in a studio.

Like specifically, I'm

here, so I can't hear anything.

I'm just kind of here in my vacuum.

But together, we can

be part of Team Human.

And that's kind of neat.

Welcome aboard, my friends.

This is the show where we take the

proverbial counter hit against all the

other things that are

happening in life, both good and bad.

Give yourselves a little bit of a break

from what's happening in the outside

world, recharge a little bit, so we can

continue the good on

fight wherever else we can.

Welcome, if this is your

first time in the internet.

We are here, and now so are you.

But can we just ask a question?

If this is your first time at the

internet, why are you here?

Like for real, like what?

This is where you're going?

Not, I don't know.

Ask Jeeves, web crawler.

Kind of a big fan of web

crawler, if I'm being honest.

Like Ask Jeeves too.

Yahoo wasn't bad back in the day.

They still exist, but they're not like

the same as they used to be.

Google, I guess you could have gone to.

Twitch, YouTube.

I think was the second

most used search engine

in the world.

It's probably gonna be

first very, very shortly after.

Maybe you're watching us on YouTube.

Who knows?

This is how you found us?

If any case, we're happy you're here.

In many ways, we're just wasting time as

we transition through

life, as we glade through life.

And I'm happy to be

wasting it with you today.

Not to say that waste

is such a bad thing.

I think it's a delightful thing to do.

It's a rebellious thing to do.

How we choose to spend

the time before we are gone.

That's a big mission.

A big modus operandi here about the show.

By the way, if you like what we're

offering, if you like

realness, if you like kind of

anti-establishment, anti-conglomerate,

but more team human, more what is it that

human beings can do and all of our

resources come together.

We have a Patreon.

I'll tell you more about that Patreon a

little bit later, but I wanna give a big

shout out to all the Patreon members and

supporters who've

supported the show along the way.

They are the real ones and they're the

ones that know that thanks to their

efforts, we're able to make not just this

show, but a second show and even a third

secret side show that's happening.

But you only find that out

by checking out our Patreon.

We'll talk about that a little bit later.

But have I done enough?

Have I done enough to make you all not

wanna be part of the show?

That's right, one of my missions is to

be a permanent wrench in the algorithm.

And right now you're trying to figure out

what the heck this show is

all about and that's okay.

But if you're still curious, well, I'm

happy to have you with us.

For realsies, I really am.

So we got a couple of

topics I wanna talk about today.

Some heartfelt ones, some real ones, kind

of everything in between.

But first off, let me ask you all, have

you seen Spider-Man?

Have you seen Christopher

Nolan's "The Odyssey" yet?

I haven't, it's no spoilers.

I wanna see them soon.

But if you have, tell me what you think.

They say it's pretty good.

They say Spider-Man is

breaking all the box office records.

Kinda wild, kinda crazy

when you think about it.

And "The Odyssey" was also breaking

records for being an IMAX movie.

IMAX movies are notoriously expensive to

make and all the other good stuff.

So that makes a lot of sense.

Hey, let me know.

Let me know if you've seen these films,

seen anything in particular.

Let us know what you want us to talk

about and we'll be happy to dive into

those topics with you.

But with that, I think it's about time we

talk about kind of a more saucy topic.

What is it that good old

AI has gotten into now?

Let's see.

(Upbeat Music)

So, have you heard what's

going on in the world of AI?

Of course you have,

you're watching this show.

More importantly though, have you heard,

have you been keeping track of what's

going on when it comes to companies like

Enthropic, destroying what we believe to

be millions of print

books to build its AI models?

Have you?

Have you?

Yeah, it's a little

spicy, a little not so great.

This actually is kind of old news.

You see, the fact is these endeavors,

these lovely companies, these AI people,

they were stealing data,

pirating data even, which is wild when

you think about it, just absolutely wild.

But then they got caught and said, "Hey,

you can't steal data for your AI models,

Claude and specific and other ones.

So, hey, you gotta like

buy them legitimately."

So they said, "Word got you there.

They buy all the documents legitimately,

and then they destroy the originals."

That's right, they make a digital copy,

load it into their AI model, and they

destroy the originals.

That sucks, right?

Here's the part I'm

not super happy about.

This got to the judge, the courts, and

the courts ruled that this destructive

scanning operation qualified as fair use

only, and this is a quotation coming from

Benji Edwards here at Ars Technica,

but only because Anthropic had legally

purchased the books first, destroyed each

print copy after scanning, and kept the

digital copy files internally

rather than distributing them.

Aha.

Okay.

Let me, can I talk about this?

I'm gonna talk about this.

You can't stop me

from talking about this.

If you are in a learning language model,

just because we're not able to track how

the distribution is going to work out, by

proxy of me being able to use this

learning language model, and that model

basing a lot of its answer, spewing back

out to me from the copy written work, is

distributing the work

in some fashion, even if it's a summary,

even if it's twisted and whatever.

That is distribution.

Am I crazy?

Am I crazy?

That's a problem, folks.

That is a legitimate problem.

I'm not happy about a lot of things when

we talk about the use of AI and data

centers and all that other good stuff.

I mean,

it's not good.

I have hope on certain elements of AI. I

have,

I think AI has uses, and we have yet to

explore what those specific uses should

be on the best level possible.

And we also have yet,

as a world, agreed upon good safeguards

we need on this stuff.

It might be that we need a cataclysmic

event for that to happen.

I say that not because I want that, but

just based on the history books, that

might be what has to happen.

That being said,

training your AI models on things and

then destroying that stuff and not at

least giving it away to a foundation or

something that would want to preserve

that data is heinous.

I don't care if you own it.

The truth is you don't own it.

I mean, you do when you don't, right?

I mean, we'll talk about this a little

bit later when it comes to like

video game licensing.

You know, when you purchase a video game,

you've never owned a video game.

You've owned a license to use that video

game, just like you own a license to

ingest and have that for

the privacy of your own home.

But if these are like legacy only copies,

why wouldn't we just be, you know, good

old team human and be like, you know

what, now that we've used it, let's give

it to a library or something.

Like they're doing it because they want

to protect the IP that

they have now stolen.

This is a form of IP

stealing, trademark stealing.

Tell me I'm wrong.

Please tell me I'm wrong.

I'm smiling because like, we all know

this, but like we're just, yep, just

sucks, just whatever.

Here's the thing though, here at the

counter hit, I don't provide bad news and

just have the same

man that fucking sucks.

Oops, I cursed.

Oh no, the algorithm lords are gonna come

after me and get me.

Fair enough, fair enough.

I respect that.

No, I don't believe in doing that.

I believe in giving ourselves some kind

of resources, some kind of something we

can walk away from, whether it's hope,

whether it's something more than that,

something of that nature to kind of make

us feel better about everything and not

just to fluff something up or, you know,

our arseholes, but rather just give us

some real humanities back here.

And there's a few things I can offer.

Again, some of this is old news, some of

it isn't quite so old news.

One of those things is Alexandria Ocasio

or Cortez, or AOC as we belovedly know

her as, she has enveloped,

proposed a bill called legislation

that will, if it passes, and we're still

a long way from it passing, will require

certain benchmarks and gates to be

fulfilled before data

centers can be built.

And it will also be

working retroactively as well.

It's called the Artificial Intelligence

Data Center Moratorium Act.

And the quote here is legislation that

would create a temporary prohibition on

the construction of new data centers and

the expansion of existing data centers

until Congress passes comprehensive

legislation to address the economic,

environmental, and safety impacts of

artificial intelligence.

This is pretty cool if you ask me.

Because I mean, if we don't have

something, these folks are building these

data centers, consuming tons of power,

resources, impacting families.

We've seen this in homesteads that are

right next to a data center

that's being built right now.

There are waters being impacted, the

environment's being impacted.

I don't wanna say this is for sure

happening, but there has to be some kind

of correlation between the extreme heat

El Nino, the global warming we're facing,

and the temperature

rising of these data centers.

I'm not saying there is definitively, I'm

not a scientist, but there has to be some

kind of correlation.

All that's happening and no

one's doing anything about it.

And we can't do anything about it because

it's all privatized, right?

This bill would, in essence, ask, demand,

require that a due

vetting process is done.

Now we can all argue whether that vetting

process will be comprehensive enough.

We can all argue whether or not this is

too little too late, but

at least it is something.

The good news of the bill is there.

The bad news is we've

just introduced the bill.

Technically got introduced, part of it

got introduced by Bernie

Sanders in March of this year.

But this version provision of the bill

kind of got through in June or so with

AOC kind of signed the bill

and kind of putting it through.

So it's in the beginning

phases of the bill itself.

It has a lot way to go.

It has to pass through the

Senate, pass through the House.

The president

has to do something with it.

I mean, to be fair, that the president

can just not sign something, but it can

still get passed into law per our US

legislation, it works.

But still, it has a long way to go, but

it's good that there are good fighters

doing the good fight.

So I salute AOC and Bernie and everyone

else for doing that right thing there.

I mean, this is crazy

that we have to do this, but

in a different kind of world, there would

have been safeguards, this kind of thing.

A lot of

what's happening here, if I can just be

candid, if I can be candid

with you, is if I'm not already.

A lot of what's

happening here is the fact that,

(Sighs)

we have a legislation

in place that is not

thinking for the greater good of

everyone, but rather thinking of the

greater good for a select few.

I don't take pleasure saying that.

I'm not happy about

saying that, but it's true.

And until we get to a place where we feel

confident here in the

United States anyway, that

our government is gonna be focused on the

greater whole of people.

We gotta take our wins where we can, and

we gotta make sure we vote.

Make sure you do your voting in November.

Vote for the people who are gonna

represent us and our voices.

Fight for the stuff, because we've got

one planet here, folks.

You got one planet.

And Daniel Pratly, who's a co-founder and

co-owner of Zero.media, as well as the

counter hit, he's a big fan

of planet earth and so am I.

And

I don't doubt that the human beings, we

might nuke things to, you know what, we

might destroy a lot of habitat here, and

we might even kill ourselves.

The planet will still survive somehow.

The great George Carlin said it himself

that way, but I'd like that not to be the

option we go towards.

I know there's an accelerationism

happening right now where a lot of folks

kind of know that time it's running out

and they're trying to speed things along,

so that way we get a massive disruption

of ecosystems and geological systems, so

that way those that can pick up the

pieces along the side can kind of, well,

be kings afterwards.

I know that's happening.

If you've been following along, that's

not a conspiracy theory, that's what's

happening right now.

That being said, we

can still do quite a bit.

We can do quite a bit

when it comes to that.

And if I can give you another solution on

the ground floor, on the ground level

that I think is a worthwhile solution,

have you heard of the internet archive?

Yeah, have you?

Have you heard of the internet archive?

I'm gonna try to, for those that are

listening in, I'm pausing, it's because

I'm trying to make sure that I'm in frame

for things, funny how this stuff works.

Let's see if I can fix it here.

There we go, awkward,

live, we're doing this live.

Have you heard of the internet archive?

They are a nonprofit entity that every

time you go to their website, they're

offering, they're asking

for some kind of donation.

And folks, I think

that's a worthwhile donation.

I think it's a

worthwhile thing to get into.

Donate them a dollar even, in the same

way that maybe we should

be donating to Wikipedia.

I don't know officially, but maybe we

should because the internet archive,

unlike other entities,

they do not cut off

the binding of the book.

They don't destroy the book.

They digitize it the hard way, one page

at a time, and then

they preserve the book.

They store the

original work and the book.

So when you are donating time and

internet archive gets a copy of it,

they're doing their due diligence to make

sure that not only is there a repository

of the old data that we can access

freely, might I say,

from the sake of preservation.

I'm a big preservationist

when it comes to this stuff.

They also offer an element of,

we're not gonna destroy this.

We're gonna either store it somewhere in

our warehouse, somewhere safe, or give it

to a place that will store and preserve

those things, the

physical entity of the thing.

So I say all this to say, hey, look, when

was the last time you thought about

donating to an organization

that you really cared about?

By the way, not a sponsor.

I feel like I need to say that.

They are not a sponsor, not at all.

We just gotta do what we can to prevent

media from getting lost.

I don't know if you've read the book.

Fahrenheit 451 by good old Ray Bradbury,

the whole plot of that

book is they burn books.

They don't let people read anymore.

Any entity that is trying to destroy

books, even if they're storing it

somewhere else, and they're holding on to

the IP themselves, the intellectual

property themselves, that is dystopian.

That is,

that's not good.

That's not good.

We can try to avoid this.

So folks, once again,

consider donating to

the Internet Archive.

They're good people.

They got some good stuff.

They've got text, they've got web stuff,

text, they got video, they got audio.

They even have software that has entered

public domain and they've

been able to store a copy of it.

They also have some other things that

dubiously might not be legal.

I'll let you navigate those Cs on your

own, the Cs of piracy.

But still, when it comes to preservation,

Internet Archive is one of the best

resources you can possibly have.

As a video game history buff nerd guy

thing, they have stored so many cool

resources that I thought we lost or, not

even just thought we lost, just

hard to find in many cases.

And in that way, in that capacity,

they're there, like strategy guides, like

gaming review journals, like old

magazines you can't find anymore.

It's all there, folks.

It's all there.

Pretty cool, pretty cool if you ask me.

So give it a shot.

If there's a nonprofit that you care

about, consider giving

them a couple bucks today.

If of course you're at a place where

literally you're scrounging to survive,

don't let me tell you to

throw your money elsewhere.

Number one priority is your family, your

loved ones, everything else.

But if you've got a couple of dollars to

just despair, consider

giving it to a nonprofit.

I think they need it

more than they ever have.

Big ups to Internet

Archive for doing what they do.

Big negative nos to any entity, anthropic

and those included, that are burning

books as they get data.

We can do a lot better than this.

We can do a lot better.

(Upbeat Music)

Which brings us to kind of one of our

meatier topics of the day.

I mean, I guess it's kind of meaty.

I don't know, you're gonna

have to tell me about that.

Did you know that video games prey upon

you as a human being?

That's right.

They prey upon you in

your wallets especially.

It's an interesting

business of video games.

Like I said before, it used to be you

paid a certain amount of money, you went

to the store, you had a license for that

game for your own personal use.

However, use that personal use as long as

it remained personal and you didn't

distribute that anywhere

else, you were free to do so.

That's the way it used to be.

Not so much or rather, it's a kind of

always been a little bit

more wibbly wobbly than that.

And now with the advent of things like a

constant online internet connection that

almost all of us have,

devices that we use that have functions

we can't turn off, I won't get into the

scariness of like online activity and

traffic activity surveillance with all of

those things in the mix,

it is

easier more than ever for

game developers and publishers to

do whatever they can to squeeze as much

juices out of you as they possibly can to

make monetary gains from that.

This matters not just because of gaming,

but rather gaming being this massive,

huge industry that is bigger than the

movie and the music industries combined.

Yes, that's true in

terms of monetary income.

Everyone's watching what

the gaming industry is doing.

And if what they're able to do is

successful, and by successful, I mean,

squeeze as much money

as they possibly can,

everyone else is gonna follow.

And we all might be a

little screwed right here.

This is such a big deal that it's even

gotten the attention of Chris Kohler.

Chris Kohler, who's a kind of a famous

financial guy on the interwebs via

TikTok, Instagram, and so forth.

He actually did a deep dive a couple of

days ago on the video game industry and

specifically how one company achieved the

most hated comment in history.

That's what the video title is called.

And he talks about this danger of this

stuff and how it deals

with the finances of things.

I think it'd probably be a pretty good

opportunity for us to

dive into this together.

And we're gonna listen to

a little clip right here.

I recommend everyone watches and listens

to his podcast himself.

It's a great podcast.

I wanna dive into two sections where he

talks about this concept called the whale

and we don't own any of this.

Let's take a listen right now.

Actually spending this

money, is it everyone?

And the short answer is no.

In fact, it's not many people.

In GTA Online, which is this hugely

popular game, the one where there's a new

version coming out this year that's been

12 years in the

making, absolutely enormous.

In the last version of that, only 4% of

active players spend any money at all

beyond buying the base game.

Wow.

But those 4%, they spend a lot.

And the industry calls these people

whales, which is the exact same term and

the exact same vibe as high

rollers at blackjack tables.

A small number of people spending a lot

of money and it's across the board.

Same number when it comes to Candy Crush,

which is the hugely popular mobile game.

Only 4% of people spend money in that,

but it earns about a

billion dollars in revenue a year.

And Rob, this kind of changes how I think

about this whole system.

And it makes it feel even

more like a casino to me.

Yeah, it is very casino-y.

And I think for those people playing it,

it's like, well, if I'm spending 10, 15

hours on this game per

week, well, this is my hobby.

Why wouldn't I spend money on it?

But then it's just that constant draw of

you might win this, you might get this,

and then you get it, and then you don't

really get much gratification from it.

Billion dollars going into this industry,

a billion dollars, it more, all from the

4%ers, the people that

spend the money on this stuff.

And we are often incentivized to believe

that who cares about them?

It's the 96% that aren't spending money.

They know better, they're not gonna spend

money on this stuff, who cares?

Now, what he's talking about are the

people that spend additional money on

in-game assets after you've

already paid for the game.

This is a practice that is common amongst

all different kinds of

games, not just Grand Theft Auto.

It was often seen as a goodwill practice

amongst video game developers who are

making their game free to play.

So for instance, if your game is free and

costs you absolutely nothing,

as a good free will, if you wanna spend a

little bit extra cash in-game towards

some customization options, some cosmetic

thing within the game, it costs the devs

very little to make those stuff, but it's

a way for you to get a little bit of

value, a lot of value actually for you,

because that's what matters to you as a

gamer, and that money

goes to the developer.

And a lot of free-to-play models

are dependent on this.

GTA though is not a free-to-play game.

It is a premium game that

you've gotta pay $80 US for,

plus there's a season pass with extra DLC

and cosmetic items and so forth.

And plus on top of that, when you buy

that season pass, you're now given a

credit card slash permission slip inside

of the game to buy more stuff.

This is infinitely spending.

There is no way, no possible way for you

to be done spending in

the game if you choose.

It's literally just however much you

wanna spend within your wallet.

That's insane to me.

I've talked about this

before here on the podcast,

how I despise the fact that if I make the

choice to purchase all of a game's DLC,

so I wanna have the complete package,

there are some games where you go to the

main menu and it's still advertising to

you that same game pass, that same

premium pass, that same DLC thing that

you already own, it's still advertising

to you because it still wants to get that

in your head, even though there's no way

for me to buy more of it.

Game developers and

publishers will do whatever they can

to squeeze all of this out of you.

I don't like it,

but that's not the scary part because

later on in the same podcast, he talks

about, well, do we actually own anything?

And like I said before, we have a history

of not really owning the video games that

we play and he's got

some words about that.

All of this that we've been talking about

so far basically amounts to

the gaming industry walking.

Now they're starting to run.

And I mentioned the

Sony bombshell earlier.

From January, 2028, no new PlayStation

games will ship on a disc.

So it'll be digital only.

We've been talking about spending money

inside games but this

I think is connected.

The company behind GTA 6 is Rockstar.

It's the biggest game

release maybe of all time.

There won't be a physical copy of it.

That means there's no shops,

there's no secondary market.

And it means changes to the game can be

made whenever they want.

Heaps of backlash on

this as you'd expect.

I mean, their own blog posts had

thousands of angry comments within hours,

days of them announcing this news.

Now there's a change.org petition sitting

near 180,000 signatures as I record this

asking Sony to reverse this decision.

PlayStation's social accounts have

basically gone quiet because every post

gets buried in outrage.

But as I mentioned, people

complain and then they spend.

This part, this part is huge.

I know that there's this belief that

we're gonna be able to

turn the tide on this.

Like really?

I think we're gonna be able to turn the

tide by just being

really outspoken about this.

And I want that to be true.

I really do.

The question I have to ask is

are we just stopping

ourselves from spending?

And the answer is no,

almost always.

The answer is, well, I'm really mad and

I'll complain, but I'm

still gonna spend the money.

I haven't seen the

pre-order figures for GTA.

I don't know if GTA has released that

information beyond marketing posts,

but it's a lot, I'm sure.

People are still pre-ordering it, even

knowing this, because to them, GTA is a

landmark historic occasion.

It doesn't matter if

there's no disc copy.

It doesn't matter if I don't get to

physically own this.

It doesn't matter if I'm upset by it.

What matters most is that I get what I

want, grand theft auto.

And that's exactly what's happening.

They're hedging their bets on this.

And I have every belief

that Rockstar is gonna win.

Now, he makes comments later about how

it is true that almost every video that

Sony publishes about completely unrelated

games is totally getting

blasted, getting destroyed.

Poor developers, like developers that are

just trying to release their game and get

gamers hyped for their game.

They can't seem to catch a break because

all the comments are just filled with

people just being upset about no discs.

And Sony's being quiet.

Who knows what they're

gonna say after a while.

That being said, can you really blame

Sony manufacturer for doing this?

I mean, when the PlayStation 5 came out,

they released a digital-only version that

you could buy if it was $100 cheaper.

And then they released a disk drive that

you could pay for, that you could add,

but it was encrypted to your console in

such a way that once you applied it in

once, you could never use

it for any other system.

You couldn't exchange it.

It was yours forever.

Sony gave us options.

They're looking at the data in a way that

none of us are able to see.

Hey, we make most of our

money on digital sales.

And we got a lot of money from our

digital versions of the console, which is

probably cheaper for us to manufacture

than the disc version of the console.

Let's go ahead and go in that direction.

And yet it wasn't long ago that I

remember consoles like

the OYAs, the Zebo,

the streaming consoles that had no disc

drive, no physical

cartridge you plugged in.

And we all reviled against that.

We all reviled against that.

It's not good when a general finance

aficionado gets more involved in what's

happening in the gaming space, what's

happening in microtransactions, what's

happening in the commerce of video games.

And he says it before in the podcast that

everyone's gonna be watching to see what

happens, whether this works or not.

And if it works even just a little bit,

you can see other markets doing very

similarly the same thing.

So why am I saying this?

Well,

I think we have an opportunity

to be a conscientious consumer

and decide when enough is enough.

I mean, we're all gonna do this anyway.

We're all at some point gonna be like,

"Hey, gaming is too expensive.

"I don't get enough value from my buck.

"I'm done with this."

I do believe that will eventually happen.

At some point, there's

gonna be inevitability.

I also believe though that it's possible

if enough of us say, "Okay, this is the

moment we could stop spending money,

"that could send a much more powerful

signal "than a petition with 100,000

votes, "100,000 signatures maybe."

Even a million signatures if it

had a million signatures.

It would just do more if they saw a

cataclysmic drop in

the finances from that.

Because that's how

these corporations speak.

They speak in terms of money.

They speak in terms of what's coming from

the consumer side because that's where

they make their bread.

That's where all their

calculations come from.

You know for a fact, Sony made this

decision knowing full

well, knowing full well

that there was gonna be some kind of

backlash from this,

some kind of backlash.

They knew it.

They knew it was coming.

They decided, you know,

it was okay to lose a little bit of this

because it'd be worth the amount of

overhead and profiting

gains we'd get from it.

They knew it was coming.

The only question is,

even when they knew it was coming,

is it measuring up to their calculated

risk that they're making for this?

That's what companies

are thinking right now.

They've been planning this for years.

And this is like a big domino to fall.

But they had boardroom

meetings to talk about this.

And by they, I mean, the executives that

are big, that are thinking five to 10

years in the future, they discussed this.

They discussed when the

PS5 was coming out to, hey,

do we wanna make a discless version?

And they evaluated the market and said,

nope, we still need discs.

And then they started

talking about the PS6.

And like, do we wanna

do a discless version?

Says, you know what, I

think we can probably,

yeah, I think we can

make that the standard.

We can do that.

I think so, it's possible.

does not feel good to feel like you are a

beta tester or a cog in a system.

There's a way to break free from this.

Again, not giving them your

commerce, if you withstand it.

Oh, but the latest game is

so cool, I need to have it.

Yes, that's how they're winning.

That's how they win

against your limbic brain system.

They're getting your emotional core out,

so that way you don't have the

opportunity to make a delayed decision.

And so that's the hack, right?

When we were Zero Dot Podcasts, we had a

wonderful therapist to kind of give us

some of these biohacks.

And I'm not a licensed therapist, but I

can give us all a bit

of a biohack right now.

We cannot stop ourselves from doing what

it is we want to do.

What we can do is give ourselves

alternative action plans

of things we would rather do instead.

Because the human brain

can't think of a negative.

So if I say, hey, don't

think about an elephant,

too late, you've all failed, you've all

thought about an elephant in the process

of trying not to think

of an elephant, right?

So what we can do is say, whenever you

think of an elephant, make sure to do

this right afterwards,

shortly afterwards or instead.

So perhaps a good alternative

action plan for some people.

I'm not here to suggest what yours should

be, but it should be, hey, when a big AAA

game that I'm looking forward to is about

to come out, and I'm super excited for

it, don't pre-order it.

You already know you're gonna buy it.

Don't pre-order it.

Say goodbye to the

pre-order bonus, whatever that is.

Usually the pre-order bonus exists in a

three-day window, even after

the game has been come out.

But I think that's a good thing.

The game has been come out, but some game

developers don't follow that

rule, but don't pre-order it.

Big believer in that.

Nakey Jakey is a big proponent of not

pre-ordering things.

I've never believed

in pre-ordering things.

Not once has there been an issue where a

game store has run

out of copies of a game

in the past 20 years.

In the past 20 years, there's been

artificial times when they've done that.

I've gone to a game store, day one, I

said, "Hey, I'd like to buy this game."

I say, "Sorry, I can't offer you any, not

for three days, because we can only offer

you copies if you've pre-ordered."

Oh, do you like not have enough copies?

Oh no, we'll have plenty of copies if we

come back in three days.

I've gotten that.

And so you know what it is?

I went to the Target next

door and they had a copy for me.

And that game stop no longer exists.

Very rarely is there

a situation where there's literally no

games available for something, and you

can't just go somewhere

else to grab your game.

They know that, but they still tell you,

"You got to pre-order."

And then they try to incentivize you by

saying you get

something extra for doing it.

What would happen if you

didn't pre-order anymore?

And then if you're already on the no

pre-order bandwagon, "Hey, scare quotes,

Sam Kirk, I already do this."

Cool, what would

happen if you waited a week?

Game comes out on Tuesday.

You wait the next Tuesday, or if it's a

Nintendo game Friday, the next Friday.

What happened if you waited a week?

Instead of buying it, the

moment it comes out, wait one week.

If you already do that, wait two weeks.

Maybe some of you say, "You know what?

I'm gonna wait till it goes on sale."

Great.

Although whenever you buy something on

sale, they're also collecting data on

that from you as well.

Because every time they do a sale, they

don't make a ton of money

from the sale during the sale.

They make money after the sale is done.

There's a spike of sales then, because

people missed out and

they wish they had gotten it.

And that tells them a lot about what

people like and don't like, and tells

them about market evaluations, and

pricing, and MSRPs, and

they still use that data.

But being kind of a conscientious buyer

and buying things when you just feel like

buying, so you're kind of like a blip in

the radar and they can't detect you.

There's kind of a rebellious

satisfaction in doing that.

As a gamer, as someone who loves gaming.

I want you to keep buying games.

I want you to keep

supporting the developers.

I don't want you to hold out on them, but

this is where they hold

you emotional hostage.

And you are getting forked over, to use

the PC term, over and

over and over again.

(Sighs)

What would happen is instead of you going

on your basic, basest

impulse, what would happen if instead

you delayed that

response just by a little bit?

You might be surprised by the results.

You might be surprised that you're able

to enjoy the piece of artwork even more,

because you wait a little bit longer,

delayed gratification.

And we might see a ripple effect if

enough of us started doing this.

I know I've been doing this for a long

time, but I'm always challenging myself,

do it a little bit more and a little bit

more and a little bit more.

I've given myself rules about when to buy

things, when not to buy things.

I generally never pre-order something.

I've fallen into a rabbit hole buying

things on day one from time to time.

But I always feel a lot better when, oh

man, I want that game.

I'm gonna wait until the right time.

And by the right time, I mean, I've got

the available time on a

Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

I've got free time available.

I can play a video game.

Let me check out that video game.

And it's been months sometimes, we go,

"Oh, look, it's on sale."

And I saved myself a couple bucks

and I'm able to enjoy the game.

Of course, there are developers that I

love so much, smaller indie developers.

I want them to get my support right away.

So I do buy their games immediately.

I'm asking that all of us just be a

little more

conscientious when we buy things.

Because this is what's happening.

They're emotionally hijacking us.

And once they emotionally hijack us,

when we get to a place where, "Wait a

minute, I don't own the game anymore."

I, my avatar that I bought all these

skins for, that's gone now.

You've just taken that from me.

They can just waive the privacy policy,

the license agreement policy that you

very, absent-mindedly just scrolled

through and clicked select yes.

So you just authorize and keep going till

you play your game that you wanted.

They just wave that in front of you, "You

signed it, you agreed to it.

We've been doing this all along."

That's what's gonna happen.

And before you come at me and say, "Oh,

you're probably just saying that because

you just think the good old

days of gaming was better."

(Lauren Laughs)

Look, man, if you grew up in the arcades,

they had you even worse.

You had to pay money each time you were

to play the game and

you never owned the game.

You went to the arcade,

played Gold Street Fighter II.

If I wanted to play Ryu, I had to pay a

quarter every single time.

That was a goldmine for gaming when we

bought into that system.

It made them sweat bullets.

Made them literally sweat bullets.

When we weren't willing to do that

anymore, we weren't

willing to get into an arcade

and just spend that kind of

disposable income anymore.

When we looked at our gaming console like

the PlayStation One and the Saturn and

the Dreamcast, "Ah, this thing can do

just as well as everything else.

This thing can do just as

well as everything else."

They were sweating bullets

for realsies.

This

probably is, I don't know, depending on

your age range, but there was a time in

the mid 2000s when gaming companies were

pushing out tons of compilation discs,

tons of retro games on

one disc for like 20 bucks.

They thought these games were worthless.

They thought they were making a couple

bucks off of us and we were paying 20

bucks for these big collections.

Now it's like, you want a collection,

it's gonna have five games on it max and

it's gonna cost 40 to $50.

Whereas before it had like 20 to 30 to 40

games on it for 20 bucks.

Sure that's inflation, but it's also

market expectations.

We can do better.

We can be a conscientious consumer and

push back a little bit in the

way that makes sense for us.

Cause that's what I'm afraid of.

I'm afraid of games, game

companies like Rockstar.

I'm afraid of Sony, just doing this and

we all complain and get mad.

And then we quietly kind of forget and we

make that decision that, you know what?

I want this gaming thing so bad, I'm

willing to compromise on

my values and what I want.

I think we can

do a smidge better.

You tell me what you think.

Drop in the comments below.

Hey, if you're still

listening, congratulations.

If you're halfway or three quarters

through something, some

people can never say that.

But also if you're still listening, you

might be interested in how you can listen

to more counter hit stuff.

That's right.

The show that keeps on

giving, we have a Patreon

called patreon.com slash zero dot media.

And for the measly sum of $3.99

or your regional equivalent, you can join

club zero dot where you get first look

access to not just the counter hit, but

also super secret awesome shows we are

developing outside of the counter hit.

That's right.

We have a second show coming up.

Let me ask you this.

Do you like books?

Do you like books and video games?

What if we smushed them

together into a super show?

We had a much more talented person behind

the mic hosting that beyond just me.

That's that show right

now is in development.

And if you're listening to this on the

week that this episode's being aired,

that means that the Patreon folks have

already seen the first episode and more

episodes are to come to

them first and first only.

You get access to that plus additional

touch points from your

host, Sam Kirk, myself.

Our goal here at zero dot is to give our

Patreon members so much value for their

$3.99 that you're just

wondering, how do they do it?

That's our goal.

And of course you can

always give more than that.

If you'd like, we don't put a cap.

Some people have given

a lot more than that.

And we are so appreciative of it.

These shows are only made possible thanks

to our Patreon members

and we thank them dearly.

So once again, if you are interested in

joining the Patreon family, go ahead and

check us out at patreon.com slash zero

dot media and get it on the fun club.

It's a good time.

Also we have a Discord.

It's a cool little private

little Discord we all hang out in.

It's a good time.

All right, let's see

what else we have to say.

(Upbeat Music)

All right, so what else

we got going on today?

Well, a couple of good things I wanna

kind of highlight for us all if we have

the spoons for them.

I was remiss in not bringing this up in

the beginning of the show.

It's a little bit of a older piece of

news, but it's something that's been

circulating the world wide web for a

little bit in my social medias.

And I thought it'd be a good time to kind

of remind people of this.

And that is the good news of the

wonderful people that are inventing crazy

technologies in the healthcare space.

It's helping everyone across the globe.

And of course, I'm here to talk to you

about the lovely and the

wonderful Dacia Taylor.

Dacia Taylor just 17 years old became a

nationally recognized scientist by

creating color changing

sutures that detect infection.

Her invention was centered around equity.

Her main career focus, making this

life-saving medical

technology accessible to everyone.

Fun fact, this technology uses beets,

which change color at different pH levels

as a natural indicator of infection.

That's pretty cool.

When beets detect acidity changes in

skin, the sutures change

from bright red to dark purple.

This color chain serves as early

detection of an infection.

Dacia supposedly came up with this idea

after learning about smart sutures that

use technology to detect wound changes

and sync to a doctor's

computer or smartphone.

Knowing that this expensive technology

would not be accessible to people in

developing countries where infection from

surgical wounds is comparatively much

higher, Dacia set out to create a much

more cost-effective solution.

We love good news like that.

Absolutely.

Thank you, Dacia.

Dacia is working on a patent right now to

make that as cost

effective as she possibly can.

Thank you for that.

And for that alone, I will say you are

one of our zero dot people of the day.

Yeah.

Let's lighten the

mood if we can, shall we?

Talk about something a

little bit more fun, a little more

vibey.

Some good news in the world of gaming.

As you are aware, we are fans here of

fighting games here and the popular video

game, Street Fighter 6 just released a

pretty significant balance patch for

those that are

interested in this kind of thing.

All being told, I haven't really put any

dedicated time to Street Fighter 6 in

quite a while, probably since the end of

season two or so, some kind of

a stranger in all of these things.

Still, it's kind of interesting to see

this balance patch come through and

Capcom as per usual has

done their due diligence in

providing patch notes.

So that way we can all kind of take an

inside glimmer as to

what their ideology is here.

Now, for those that are new to the

fighting game space,

in fighting games, it was very popular

for a big update to occur and you had to

pay full price to play this new update.

Usually this update had all kinds of

interesting new mechanics, new

characters, new

backgrounds, new art, new modes.

They did a lot, the game developers, to

try and incentivize you to just pay for

this update wholesale every single time.

Nowadays, they drip and

drab, they trickle you with

character passes you buy, buy a brand new

character or four new characters.

And usually these balance updates as

we're calling them are free.

So you'd be the judge as to whether you

think that's a better

ecosystem than it was before.

But with this ecosystem right here,

announced August 3rd, 2026, that's today.

They say, this is quoting from Capcom's

website, "This battle adjustment was done

with the aim of shifting the game's

balance by looking at every character and

making adjustments."

Okay, "While we believe the game's

balance has reached a reasonable stable

state, thanks to repeated adjustments."

Okay, "The relative strength of each

character has not shifted

significantly in recent updates."

Yep, and depending on your ideology,

that's a good thing.

Maybe it's a bad thing, who knows?

Due to this, we decided to implement

changes specifically to shake things up.

Please note that there are no adjustments

applied universally to all characters,

and it moves on to

some other things here.

So the purpose of this balance patch is

not to rebalance the

game or make it even better.

It's to literally shake things up,

because as they've been fine-tuning this

game to a very specific spot,

characters have kind of stayed where they

are in terms of the balance of power

between other different characters.

And in the world of gaming and fighting

games, that can be

really boring for people.

So they are doing a kind of fun shake

things up kind of patch.

That's curious, because that is not the

direction that I think or thought Street

Fighter 6 was going in.

They are definitely in the e-sports

space, the Capcom Cup, the Evolution

fighting game series.

They're trying to milk that e-sports cow

as much as they can.

From a business perspective, I

wonder if they're

doing this because they've

seen a significant higher drop-off of

players than they were expecting, and

they're trying to renew some kind of

interest in the game while still trying

to keep the competitive

ecosystem very similar.

Who knows?

I can't speak to whether any of these

changes are gonna be better or worse, but

I can speak to whether I think

they're interesting and fun and might

provide some particular value.

Let's walk through a couple

of these changes right now.

Modern control adjustments.

So for those playing Street Fighter 6 for

the first time, you played for a while,

there's two different modes of

controlling in Street Fighter 6.

There's classic and there's modern.

Classic is the way you've played Street

Fighter one through up until six.

You got a joystick or directions or maybe

even a leverless with buttons, and you've

got six command buttons,

three punches, three kicks.

Jab strong fear,

short forward roundhouse.

If you wanna put some macros on there,

you can, but generally

it's about a six button game.

Modern controls,

tried to simplify this with a general

low, medium and heavy attack of varying

kinds, a special dedicated move button

and other buttons that are dedicated as

well, but it ended up being kind of a

seven button game technically by

definition in a weird way

it became more complicated.

But the thing about modern controls is it

allowed you to almost instantly react to

things with certain special inputs

because there wasn't a requirement for

special inputs anymore.

You just always have the

right answer if you did it right.

This says here with this battle

adjustment, we've updated certain normal

moves that utilize the attack button and

special moves, ones that utilize the

special button for specific characters.

Additionally, for moves that are

performed by pressing down plus the

special button, you can now select the

strength of the special move by inputting

down back, down or down forward.

Oh, interesting.

So in modern controls, you didn't really

have access to different strengths of

move like you did in classic.

Like I said, you have light, medium,

heavy on the punches and kicks.

Jab strong fear,

short forward roundhouse.

Here they're giving you a little bit of

that, especially when the down special is

what you're trying to go for.

Interesting.

I am one who thinks that a modern control

scheme could absolutely work.

I'm really curious to see it work.

What I played in Street Fighter 6 wasn't

quite it, but I'm glad they're still

tackling that beast and

trying to do something with it.

I think that's

interesting and fascinating.

I think it'll probably need a deeper

rehaul to what's currently

there, but maybe I'm wrong.

We'll find out.

All right.

And then obviously with this modern

control scheme, it looks like they're

going to be changing up how some of the

layout of these moves work and assisted

combos and so forth and

how they've been reflected.

I guess that's a

character by character basis.

So beyond that, there's a bunch of

different characters we could look at.

Let's look at just a few that I think are

pillars of Street Fighter.

So first ones first, let's look at Ryu.

Regardless of your opinion, Ryu is like

the center of Street Fighter.

He's the Hadouken, the Shoyuken, the

Tatsumouki Sempokic, or as Aaron from

Egoraptor says, he said

like some pound cake, right?

And he's the central character of what

Street Fighter is all about.

And here's what we got here.

So Ryu has received adjustments

at improving his ability to

maintain offensive momentum

after successfully landing attacks.

These include changes to the pushback on

block for his standing light punch and

solar plexus strike, as well as improve

post hit situations after whirlwind kick,

aerial Tatsumouki

Sempokic kick, et cetera.

We've also made adjustments on his

overdrive arts, wouldn't

fully connect insert situations.

Okay.

From what this reads, they're not

fundamentally changing how Ryu plays.

And

I'm just gonna go on a hot little take

and say that's a little bit of a bummer

because I have never been super satisfied

with how Ryu played in Street Fighter 6.

To me, Ryu and the fireball and the

fireball being one of the most important

tools in his arsenal, I feel like his

fireball is not the most important tool

in a world where

drive rush is so powerful.

And so I would have loved for them to

enhance the fireball a bit.

And this does not read like they're gonna

be making any of those changes.

I'm looking through here if there's any

adjustments made to his

fireball specifically.

Okay, look, overdrive Hadoken, reduced

combo count initial value and additional

value on the first and second attacks.

Okay, got it.

Increase combo count,

additional value on the final attack.

Okay, so basically it allows the move to

connect more combo specific situations

but it doesn't enhance the damage at all.

Okay, got it, got it, got it.

Yeah, and that's it.

And you can look at frame data.

All right,

let me look at one more character.

I'm curious to see what

they've done with Zangief.

So Zangief is a

character that is a grappler.

His whole

idea is to

grab you in close proximity

and do a ton of damage to you.

And they've decided in modern street

fighter that whereas before grabs were

instantaneous or one frame, they try to

give you like five frames

now before grab happens.

So you can jump out of grabs.

And so Zangief has an aerial grab and two

ground SPD type grabs, three technically

by definition, plus his normal grabs.

So he's kind of like

a mixed up character.

And in the world with Drive Rush,

he's kind of like a, he can be like kind

of an oppressive Rushdown

character in some cases.

I've seen it happen.

I'm curious to see what they changed here

because one of the dynamics of Zangief

is, is that he has this lariat, the

spinning lariat that he has.

It's a good anti-air option for sure, but

it doesn't hit behind him.

And a lot of Zangief players, myself

included, would have loved if the lariat

hit a little bit behind him.

Let's see.

The change to power stomps adds another

low attack option to Zangief's options.

We've also looked to increase situations

players can aim to go

for double lariat, okay?

And Russian suplex.

And produce the number of situations he's

left at a disadvantage when whiffing an

attack or trying to take his turn.

All right, some buffs to power stomps,

which is a move that is safe, but only in

like certain situations, like after a

drive rush or on wake up

or something of that nature.

And double layer, we've expanded the

attack hitbox against

crouching opponents.

But this only occurs if the attack is

performed as a cancel

from a normal attack.

Oh, so if you cancel it from a normal,

it might hit the crouching opponent.

That's interesting.

This adjustment ensures that if the

attack connects with the opponent's body,

so just when landing the tip of crouching

medium punch or standing light kick on

punish counter, double layer will always

combo so long as you hold forward.

Okay, so it's just a combo extender.

Okay, and then Russian suplex.

We've just had this move works.

So now that using the heavy kick will

always result in Russian

suplex no matter the distance.

Oh.

So the way this worked

for Zangief initially,

Russian suplex or Siberian Express is the

same input, but it depends on how close

you were proximity wise.

If you're far away, it's Siberian Express

where he does like a bear running grab.

He's got his arms up and he runs up and

he comes right out of you.

Russian suplex is the one most people

want because it's a little bit faster and

it does a ton of damage.

So here it says, if you're using the

heavy kick button, every time

it's gonna be Russian suplex.

Although the damage for a heavy version

is slightly lower than the

light or medium versions.

Oh, the post-attack situation and super

hard gain is the same in addition to its

effective range being expanded.

So reducing the damage, that's weird.

Makes sense, but it's weird.

Hmm, interesting.

All right,

I could go through more characters, I'm

sure, but it sounds like this is a, they

say it's to shake things up and maybe it

will, but still feels like it's gonna be

mostly the same Street Fighter 6.

So if you love Street Fighter 6,

you're in a good time.

If you don't like Street Fighter 6,

I don't know if you're

gonna have a great time.

I just don't, I don't know.

You be the judge, you tell me.

(Upbeat Music)

All right, folks, we gotta

get a little personal today.

Hey, little, I gotta

switch things up just a smidge.

I'm gonna talk to you about something

also gaming related.

I promise we're not all gonna talk about

nothing but gaming, but something also

gaming related that,

(Sighs)

it's a hem in my craw, as they say.

So here's the deal.

My mother passed away in June.

And in that

matter of time when my mother was in

hospice and my mother passing away, I've

just had this natural, as one does, this

desire to kind of go back on my childhood

and get some comfort from that.

And one of the things I

recalled from that period in time

was the good old Nintendo 64.

Not the greatest console ever made.

I'll talk about that later at some other

time, but it's been, it was a console

during a time in my life

that was very formative.

And I just, for whatever reason,

maybe with Star Fox 64, the remake coming

out and the Nintendo Switch,

just felt the need to kind of

dive into it a little bit more, you know?

Just kind of

enjoy it, bask in the Nintendo 64.

And at the same time, there was this

little doohickey, this little guy that

was being developed by

a company called Analog.

That was a FPGA recreation of the

Nintendo 64 with an upscaling

technology of 4K resolution.

I am an ad, just so

we're on the same page.

I have purchased a

lot of Analog products.

I own the Analog Mega

SG, the Analog Super NT.

I own two Analog pockets.

I'm an Analog fan, we'll call it.

If you wanna call me a shill, go for it.

If you wanna call me biased, go for it.

I don't love, love their products.

They've all got a little couple of warts

that I'm not the craziest about.

The Mega SG, no matter what I do with

that device, I get the sound exactly like

the Sega Mega Drive or Sega Genesis.

I accept that, but it bugs me.

The Super NT

actually is better than the original

Super Nintendo hardware because Super

Nintendo hardware has a couple of faults

to it when it comes to its video quality,

that it just comes out

of the box fixing that.

And I think it's, don't quote me on this,

but I think it's a smidge faster too,

which is fine for me because I always

felt Super Nintendo was

a slow moving machine.

And the Pocket is great with the dock and

everything and it's cool stuff, but I've

never found it super comfortable to use.

So I think all the Analog products,

they're sold as like boutique,

luxurious retro gaming devices

under the guise that you're playing the

most accurate way to play these games

with an HGTV in front of you.

I don't think they always hit the mark.

That being said, I was in the

market and it was available.

And I thought I'd go ahead and grab

myself the Analog 3D.

The

Analog 3D.

I got the block edition right here.

It looks really fancy.

Let me

change it over here.

Yeah.

The Analog 3D is the Nintendo 64 version

of a recreated retro console.

It's their latest one.

And it is specifically

designed for the Nintendo 64.

It's got a couple of

cool enhancements on it.

So for instance, it's

got Bluetooth technology.

It's got access to wifi.

You can use Bluetooth specific

controllers on this.

In fact, I bought them.

These are made by a

company called 8BitDo.

They look like this.

Notice how they look like a traditional

controller, but they're just N64ified.

I'll get to that a little bit later, but

this is compatible with the Nintendo

Switch and Switch 2, as

well as your Analog 3D device.

And it's cool to be able to play this

with all wireless controllers, if that's

what you so chose and wanted to do.

It comes with a bespoke SD card slot

that one has to use to

update the firmware and BIOS.

It also has built inside

of it, a controller pack

and

expansion pack.

That's a big deal because on the N64,

expansion pack was something separate you

had to plug into the device.

And certain games you didn't want to run

with the expansion pack

and certain games you did.

Like for instance, Castlevania Legacy of

Darkness, you can technically run that

with the expansion pack, but when you do,

it's only a matter of time before that

thing crashes almost every time.

It's a game breaking bug.

So you kind of want to play it in low res

mode with the expansion

pack turned off if you can.

It's all pre-baked

right here in the system.

Now I'll get to the controllers in a

second, the 8BitDo controllers, but

I want to talk about what I bought

alongside all that stuff.

I've talked about this before in the

Patreon only version of this show.

I was talking to one of our lovely

Patreon supporters, Robert Rastont.

I used to have a pretty impressive

Nintendo 64 collection.

Truly I did.

I had about 50 games,

which doesn't sound like a lot, but keep

in mind, I believe the United States

library of Nintendo 64 was

only 288 total games, I think.

And I think

internationally there's only 388 games.

I think that's the number.

So having 50 games was a lot and they

were all the big hits like Ocarina of

Time, Perfect Dark, Golden Eyes, Super

Mario 64, Mario Kart, Diddy

Kong Racing, Resident Evil 2.

What a wild game.

I had all those.

And in one of the great gaming purges of

my life when I really needed the money

and things weren't going so well for me,

I sold a lot of them.

I kept a few, so I still have Perfect

Dark and Golden Eye and Mario 64.

I also have a copy of Rogue Squadron.

Great game, but I'm surprised

that's one of the ones I kept.

There's a lot of them I'm missing.

So I used to have these games.

I still have them somewhere, via local

backup some way, thanks to sources like

Internet Archive and other things, wink,

wink, nudge, nudge, they're still mine.

I own them.

And, you know, of course I have the

technology I have arcade boards where I

dump data on those things.

I wanted a way to be able to switch

between all the different Nintendo 64

games that I own,

wink, wink, nudge, nudge,

have a good time with them.

So I picked up a

EverDrive 64 cartridge, X7.

X7 because it's on X5, it's on X3, it's

the real deal, it's

the whole kit can bootle.

This was when I bought it.

The best EverDrive for N64 you could buy.

And this is my rub folks, this is what

I'm not happy about.

I said the word was,

and that's because,

literally today on August 3rd, 2026, I've

only had my device for a couple of days.

The EverDrive 64 Pro has come out.

What the?

(Blows Raspberry)

That's not fun, not fun for anyone.

I didn't get an email saying, "Hey, this

is coming up, maybe you

wanna wait until this comes out?"

Nope, I had to wait two

whole weeks for this to come.

Not complaining, they're from Ukraine and

the whole shipping thing is a nightmare.

And I'm so happy that Krix

is able to operate at Ukraine.

That's where his country's from.

Like I'm not hating on that.

It's just, man, this thing just came out.

Why didn't I know?

I'm not happy about this because I've

bought almost every EverDrive device for

all of my retro consoles,

Game Boys, SEGA, Nintendos.

I feel like I got ripped off here,

especially just bad timing, right?

I am in the process of trying the,

there's another flash cart on the market

that is quite ubiquitous.

It's open sourced.

So unlike the EverDrive,

this will be open source.

I'm gonna check that out.

Because the one thing that this Pro

EverDrive has is the ability to place

native Nintendo 64 DD

games, this drive games.

There's only a handful of those games.

So it's not that much

of a loss, but still,

still.

It's the principle of the thing.

Also this EverDrive X7, I was trying to

run a fun ROM hack with it called

Super Smash Brothers Remix Plus Extra.

And that doesn't work on this because

this has a cap on how big the file size

for your N64 ROMs can

be when you patch them.

This Pro as well as the open source

cartridge I'm gonna be trying doesn't

have that same issue.

So I'll keep on the loop

and how that works out.

I'm bummed out about that because I'm on

a roll of enjoying good old Nintendo 64.

I'm also bummed out about something else.

I bought my analog 3D and I bought it

with four of these controllers because I

thought wouldn't it be cool to have it

wireless and play with a modern scheme

and just kind of relive days.

I have two legitimate

N64 controllers at home.

It's not a big deal.

This is fine.

But if you're watching this on video,

this is an N64 controller.

You need the three prongs.

They made it modern.

And it's like this controller is meant

for someone who doesn't like the N64.

And that was my mistake

because I love the N64 controller.

It's not the perfect controller, but for

what it is, it's great.

And this controller is meant for the

person who's like, I hate the N64

controller, just shoves it in their hand

like, I can get with this.

I wish there was a right

analog stick, but I like this.

It's actually more confusing because

both the bottom triggers are Z.

They're both the same Z.

So you get to choose

which Z you want to click.

But in my head, Z is

always the left hand, right?

It's always the right hand.

It operates fine.

The joystick itself is Hall Effect.

If that matters to you, I found that Hall

Effect is just a nice marketing term.

I'm not saying it doesn't do something,

but for most people, Hall

Effect doesn't make a difference.

It's a big thick stick, and it's like a

GameCube stick for some people.

Not like the big thin wobbly one, which

again, if you love the N64, you kind of

need that classic stick in my opinion.

But overall,

those things aside,

I like the analog 3D.

It's pretty cool.

It's got a couple of cool features, like

I said before, baking in the expansion

pack and the controller pack in there.

More importantly though, it has this cool

like overdrive feature where you can like

unlock the frame rate and like take it to

multiple nths of degrees of insanity.

Some games break with it, but some games

run really nicely with it.

I've been playing Perfect Dark with the

Unleashed CPU profile, and you get a

frame rate of like upwards of 60 FPS and

sometimes as low as 40.

That sounds heinous, but considering

Perfect Dark runs at 30 to 15, no, I

think it's like 20 frames to like 15

frames and sometimes five frames.

It gets real bad.

My friends and I have been able to crash

Perfect Dark many a

time, good old proximity

mines and

mines and so forth.

This guy's able to overclock these games

and run circles in a way that feels

better than running it through an

emulator, which is my final point.

I'm a fan of emulation.

I think emulation is a great tool.

N64 emulation is still not...

It's not great.

It's fine.

Some people might really enjoy it, but

I'm not the biggest fan of N64 emulation.

And in my opinion, the two things you

need is to run the game on OG hardware

and preferably have the original

controller unlike what the 8Bitdo's are.

These are fine.

They will do.

I'll continue to play with them and have

fun with them, but I would prefer having

a real legit N64 controller.

They also run well on Switch.

But as I have learned playing a lot of

N64 games on the Switch Online service,

they don't emulate

super well there either.

Even Nintendo's official emulator has

bugs and glitches and texture issues that

just don't exist in the real game.

Notice some audio lag in Star Fox 64,

which is a real shame.

Not a big deal since I can play the

original and I can play the remake, but

still Switch Online

service version isn't the best.

Anyway, I'll give you more of a fuller

breakdown of what the

analog 3D can do at a later date.

I think it's a cool piece of kit.

I don't think you need it though.

If you already have an N64, there are

resources available to plug and play an

HDMI kind of adapter to the video port

and you'll get very good results if you

want to play on the

truly authentic hardware.

I can say if you want the best ever

drive, the X7 is no

longer that, the Pro is.

Let me know if you get one,

let me know if you like it.

I'd love to kind of know a

little bit more about that.

But right now I'm just gonna wait for my

alternative open source flash drive with

64DD support comes in.

I'll see how that works out for you and

I'll let you all know.

(Upbeat Music)

All right, ladies and gentlemen,

we are

in the space, in the times.

Let's get weird, shall we?

The internet is a really, really weird

space for a lot of us.

It's got good stuff, bad stuff,

bizarre stuff, not safe for work stuff.

Don't worry, we're not gonna get into not

safe for work stuff here.

But I thought it'd be nice for us to kind

of dip and dive into the lovely

discoveries we might

have on the internet.

And one of those things happened from a

good friend of mine, his screen name goes

by the name of raiseq8.

So raiseq8, thank you for

this shout on this tweet.

That's right, talk about tweets today.

I won't call them x.com

posts, even though it is x.com.

And no, I'm not a member of

twitter slash x.com anymore.

I left that ship a long time ago.

That being said,

when good things happen on other

platforms, I think it's important to

highlight what some of those things are.

And this is a fun, I would call just pure

poetry post coming from a

user, Nobunaga slash JP.

Every single line of this

is just absolute poetry.

I wanna share it all with you right now

without any further ado.

It goes like this.

I needed to move a sofa.

I mentioned this to an American.

He said, do you know

anybody with a truck?

I did not know anybody with a truck.

(Keyboard Clicking)

He looked at me with

real concern, not pity,

concern.

The way you look at a man who has told

you he does not have a name.

You gotta know somebody with a truck.

I asked how one acquires such a person.

(Laughs) He said, you just do.

This is the third time I've received that

answer in this country.

It is the answer to everything here.

You just do.

There is no process.

There is only the

eventual fact of having.

He said, ask Kevin.

I do not know what Kevin.

He said, Kevin, like I should.

He said it the way

you say a shared uncle.

I met Kevin four days later.

Kevin owns a truck.

Kevin does not own a truck for himself.

Nobody owns a truck for themselves.

Kevin owns a truck for a 15 mile radius.

Inside I said, this man has taken a vow.

He did not announce it.

He simply purchased a bed

and accepted the consequences.

Kevin arrived on Saturday.

He brought the truck.

He also brought a second man.

I had not asked for a second man.

The second man's name is Tony.

Tony came because Kevin came.

Tony did not know me.

Tony did not ask what we were moving.

Tony brought gloves.

They moved the sofa in 11 minutes.

I offered them money.

Both of them laughed.

(Laughs)

Which felt rehearsed.

And was not.

I asked what I owed them.

Kevin said, buy the pizza.

That is the price.

That is the entire economy.

The truck costs one pizza and the pizza

is non-negotiable and the pizza is also

not expensive and

everyone knows what size.

Inside I said, the fee is fixed.

Across the entire

nation and was set by no one.

We ate on the floor because the sofa was

against the wall and none of us wanted to

be the first to sit on it.

Tony told me his daughter plays soccer.

I asked if she is good.

He said, she's aggressive.

(Laughs)

I still think about that.

Me too.

Three weeks later,

Kevin texted me.

You free Sunday?

Helping Tony move a fridge.

He did not ask if I wanted to.

He informed me of a fridge.

Inside I said, I've been called up.

I did not enlist.

The papers were filed on my behalf.

I went.

I moved the fridge.

I have no truck.

I contributed only arms.

Afterward, a man I had never met asked me

if I knew anybody with a truck.

I said, yeah,

I got a guy.

I have a guy.

I am somebody's guy now too.

Tony has told two people about me.

He

described me as the guy

who's strong for his size.

I have never been prouder

of a sentence in my life.

(Soft Music)

All right, folks, we've been talking a

bit about fighting games today.

And I think it's important that we keep

up our promises to our patron members.

One of our patron members, David Rivera,

asked us to kind of talk about a

different fighting game term or piece of

concept in fighting games to help

illustrate to people that anyone can

understand fighting games they want to.

And we wanna do that right now for our

listeners, to everyone, and thank you,

David Rivera, for the idea.

So folks, I love, love fighting games.

I think they're pretty cool.

And I think everyone can play them.

We get scary for peoples and people talk

about this thing called frame data.

Frame data, numbers, yeah.

Okay, yeah, it's a little scary, okay?

It sounds intimidating.

But I promise you,

we can talk about fighting games in a

way, using the word frame data in a way

that doesn't scare anyone and everyone

can walk away just a little bit smarter.

So when we talk about frame data, what

are we talking about?

Well, imagine a baseball pitcher.

And imagine what they do

when they walk up to the plate.

They wind up their arm, they swing their

arm, and then they let go.

And the ball exits their hand and the

ball is going, who knows

how fast, really blazing fast.

And you get a strike, a strike, another

strike, and you're out.

They do that multiple times in a game.

Every single time a

baseball player does this, they are

committing an action that is easy for our

eyes to understand, but all

of us do it on a daily basis.

Everything has a beginning, everything

has a middle, and everything has an end.

Or put another way, everything we ever do

as a physical human being has a windup.

It has a moment in which things are

happening and we're making contact with

the thing we're doing, and then we have a

recovery or a cool down.

Everything has this,

everything.

Very few things in life

are truly instantaneous.

And the same thing can be

said for fighting games.

Fighting games are,

whether it's 2D or 3D, games

with what we call animations.

So every single character, they're

bipedal characters of

some kind, arms and legs.

Before they're about to land a punch,

they're about to wind up for that punch,

then they land the punch, and then they

start recovering from that punch.

Every single character, with a few

exceptions, has this applied

to almost all of their moves.

A windup,

a piece where they're making contact, and

then the recovery, those three phases.

And today I wanna talk to you about how

we can understand frame data from a

perspective of

understanding just those three elements.

Windup, how we make contact,

and then the recovery phase.

But let's change the

language just a smidge.

Because I've been using the words windup,

how we make contact, and cool down.

Let's change it to the startup of a move,

the active part of the move when the

move's making contact.

And then we can call it the cool down, or

we can call it the

recovery, meaning the arm.

If you're doing a big swing with your

arm, you're recovering.

Your arm has to recover.

You can't just freeze in

place and retract back.

That's not how the laws of physics and

thermodynamics work.

So let's talk about, from a perspective

of, there is a startup,

an active, and a recovery.

Every move in every fighting game

generally follows this basic principle.

The startup in a move for

a fighting game character

you're

getting ready to do the move, but you're

not quite doing anything yet.

It looks like you're doing something, but

you're actually not.

The active part of the move is the move

that actually does something.

It hits you, it attacks you, it will do

damage if you run into collision with it.

And then the recovery part has to happen.

If we could, we'd skip

this in whatever way we can.

But if you get hit while you're

recovering, you're totally vulnerable

because you're

recovering while you do it.

See, basic language, we understand this.

Now the next part to

understand about frame data.

For a majority of fighting games, what

you see on the screen is not 100%

commiserate to what's

happening in the game code.

Don't worry, I'm not

using scary language here.

Just in the game code,

there's animation frames and then there's

what we call hit boxes.

These are collision boxes, little squares

that the game decides if something

interfaces with those

squares, something will happen.

And for us, when something interfaces

with a square, we get hit,

they get hit, nobody gets hit.

That's how the logic works.

So in the most basic of terms,

during the windup of a

move, the startup of a move,

the hit box for you being able to attack

the person usually isn't gonna be there.

During the active frame of the move,

that's when the part where you can attack

someone and hurt someone exists.

And then on the recovery, the active

frame is gone once again.

It's like the cost you have to pay for,

the toll you have to pay to do this move.

If you're watching this on video, I'd

like to demonstrate to you right now on

my screen so you can see this.

Here you see an

animation frame of a move.

I believe it's Dudley's jab.

So Dudley is a character from the game

Street Fighter III, Third Strike.

And on my screen, you'll see that he has

a variety of boxes all

over him, blue and red.

He has a green box to tell us where he is

positioned, generally speaking.

And we're about to see

an animation play out.

This move, this jab of

his is 12 frames long.

12 frames, what does that mean?

You're already confusing

me, Sam, don't worry about it.

A majority of fighting games run on 60

frames a second, 1 60th of a second.

12 frames means this

exists for 12 60ths of a second.

It's pretty fast jab.

I'm gonna slow it down, slow it down real

slow so we can see each

part of this together.

We'll notice that when we start this jab

animation, there's the windup,

there's the active.

The windup is Dudley getting into

position, throwing the jab, and you'll

see a little bit of a

red box appear right by

Dudley's arm.

That part of the equation, that part of

the animation is the

active part of the move.

So the parts before and after are not

active parts, which means that Dudley is

vulnerable to attack during those phase.

He's vulnerable during the entire move,

but the only time in which he's actually

doing any kind of damage

is during the active frames.

Let's look at another example.

Let's stop this one right here.

Let's look at another example together.

Let's look at Ken, same basic principle.

We're gonna slow down the

animation real nice and slow.

He's gonna do a fierce punch.

And right now he's got blue boxes or

reddish bluish boxes all over.

When we play the animation, we see that

does a lot of flashing.

I don't know why that's gonna

cause me a seizure right here.

Here we go, it's flashing, it's gone.

We see when we play the animation, he has

a big windup and then the active part of

the frame, his elbow and his fist only

exists for a certain part of it before it

disappears again, and you

will see the windup there.

Every single move in a

fighting game operates this way.

There are a few exceptions.

In some games, throws, for instance, are

instant, so there's no

hit box to show that.

That's true.

But generally speaking, if you can

understand on a fighting game level that

every single move that you have when

you're playing a fighting game,

there's a beginning, a middle, and end of

that animation, and the beginning is

generally vulnerable, the end is

generally vulnerable, and the middle

part, the active part, wherever that

exists is the part where you're actually

doing damage, well, you'll have a deeper

understanding of fighting

games than most people do.

Now, I've been

playing this in slow motion.

If I turn up fast speed,

so 60 frames per second,

you will see

that the move

operates incredibly quickly.

So speed is definitely a factor in terms

of reaction times and everything else.

So that is your fighting game tip for the

day when it comes to

frame data and hit boxes.

We can get into the nerdy stuff a little

bit later, but I wanted to talk to anyone

who's listening and watching so they can

understand how frame data is understood

on the most basic of levels, and I plead

to you all one final plea.

As a fighting game fan,

I love fighting games, they're great.

It's within your best interest to have a,

as much of an understanding of the

fighting game that you can withstand,

and that includes stretching yourself a

little bit towards uncomfortability.

It's really common in the fighting game

space to dive into this hobby and say,

I'm never gonna learn frame data, or I'm

only gonna learn frame data.

Both of those absolutionist views

are a little limiting.

There are things to be understood about a

fighting game on an intimate sound, audio

mechanical, biomechanical intuitive level

that cannot be understood if you only

look at it intellectually.

And there are things to be understood on

an intellectual basis, mathematical basis

that cannot be understood

intuitively from your heart.

You should understand both elements.

Of course, enjoy fighting games in

whatever way you can.

I'm not super hyper, everyone's gotta be

competitive in this space.

I am just advocating though, distract

yourself a bit and know that whatever

limits you think you have, chances are

you're full of crap.

And if we extend those limits far beyond

what you ever imagined, you'd be really

surprised with the results.

(Music)

All right, our final story today isn't

one that I'm super

pleased with talking about.

But I think it's important to talk about

because it's close to what myself and

Daniel really care a lot about here at

Zero Dot Media Productions, which is the

human element of who we are.

Before I dive into the

story, a couple things.

When we started Zero Dot,

we used a platform called

Riverside to host our podcast.

And the things that we were attracted to

most by Riverside was how easy it was

going to be to do things

like transcribe episodes,

create shorts for us, do what they called

magic episodes, where it would just after

we edited a couple of episodes ourselves,

it would find what our references were

and help create rough cuts in the vein of

our old edits for us.

And as three people at the time that

didn't know a whole lot about podcasting,

were really excited about the prospect of

being able to dive in and kind of look a

little bit

professional, we tried Riverside.

And we used some of those AI features.

We used AI features for transcription.

Right now, you're seeing a transcription

happen on right now that is actually on a

local AI module I'm

using for this very purpose.

It's not

connected to the World Wide Web.

It's just a local AI that we use here in

my video editing software.

We also used AI for

making a lot of our shorts.

We made a lot of shorts content.

We made a ton of shorts

content using the AI module.

And Daniel would do, he was our producer

at the time, and he

would do a fantastic job

taking those AI module shorts and

trimming them or

cutting them or making them.

And then towards the end, before we stop

making shorts altogether, which we're

going to get back to later on in our

careers here at Zero Dot,

the last couple of weeks, all the shorts

was made specifically by him.

And all of the clips, the longer form

clips we made were made by him with no AI

interference whatsoever.

And we looked at those

and went, these are better.

They're just better.

Even though we're team human and we're

team environment, we were kind of

dismissive of, oh, yeah, but we're using

AI and like, but we're doing it like

sustainably and

ethically and all that stuff.

We were wrong.

I'll say that.

And that was an onus on me.

I should have been a

better bastion of that.

Since then, we've made a lot of efforts

to deplatform ourselves

from Riverside.

I'll talk about Riverside another time,

my criticism of that platform.

But as of right now, we're not hosting on

Riverside and shortly we will not be

anywhere near that platform.

And we do everything locally in-house and

we only use AI for, like I said, the

transcription you're

seeing on the screen right here.

And that's basically it.

Even the sound, which has an AI module to

it that Riverside has, we

didn't like the results of.

Not to mention everything that Riverside

does was server-wide and server-based.

Hence why, hence how AI works, right?

So if something went wrong on the

platform, it was a whole kibbuta.

We couldn't just fix it ourselves.

Anyway, we stepped away from that stuff.

So I say this knowing that I'm going to

come across as a

hypocrite and I don't mean to.

But recently a creator that I admire

quite a bit, a science educator of sorts,

hasn't just been caught using artificial

intelligence for either their script or

their brainstorming or whatever.

Well, I think

something worse has happened.

But to uncover this, let's

talk about the story at hand.

I'm talking about Hank Green.

Now, Hank Green, like I said, is a

science creator that I

quite admire quite a bit.

I think Hank Green is

one of the real goats.

He was an inspiration for the early days

of what the Zero Dot

podcast was all about.

And he was caught by people or people

propose that they think

he was using AI of sorts.

This comes from a video where Hank kind

of makes an off the hand

comment that doesn't quite land.

Let's see if we can find

out what that comment is.

Let's do a quick listen to see if we can

catch what we think might be the proof or

the results or some kind of indication

that Hank Green is using a learning

language model for

some part of his script.

There's a thing in there that

matters and that's very cool.

A better way to say it, and I appreciate

the pushback, is a word is a human

invention and human inventions are made

by bodies and brains.

I appreciate the pushback.

Pushback in what context?

A lot of people believe that this is an

indicator that he was reading what the AI

prompt was saying to him

and the AI prompt was saying, I

appreciate the pushback and then continue

with the rest of his spiel.

That's what people think.

They accused him of this, Hank Green,

leading viewers to speculate that he'd

written the script with a chat bot and in

the process accidentally included a

response in one of his prompts.

And this story comes to us from

TechCrunch so that you can

find the story in other places.

In a response to a since deleted post on

X, x.com, Twitter for those that are

following, Green acknowledged that he'd

produced the video under a ton of

pressure quote and used chat TBT quote

for research on this script quote.

At the same time, he said the pushback

line was actually a

response to the episode's guest.

Okay, possible, probable.

Green then offered a more in-depth

apology on Reddit where he said he was

mortified that he'd let some people down

and that he plans to reduce his video

production as a result.

Oof.

Let's read the whole thing.

Three things to start.

I'm mortified that I let so many people

down and I think I

understand how that happened.

I'm going to change

things about how I make stuff.

Complexly's AI policy, which listed the

hyperlink is right there, is public and

well considered and

adhered to by the whole team.

I think it's worth reading.

Complexly is the nonprofit that makes

Crash Course and SciShow and a bunch of

other shows that I do not write for.

He continues.

The thing that everything we do is based

on is that you know that what I'm saying

are my thoughts coming from

my brain in the way I decide.

I have made that harder and I'm sorry.

I've been relying too

heavily on AI as a research aid.

It can be very useful for this task,

giving me access to a lot of papers I

didn't know existed really fast.

But I think that has been to the

detriment of my work because it has not

given me the freedom to find all of my

own ways into and around a topic.

But for clarity, the origin of claims in

my videos are not "JET GPTs said this."

I have been using AI to locate papers and

other resources for

learning about topics.

You are still getting my takes based on

what I read, know, and learn.

I think what people have said in this

thread about me

diluting myself is spot on.

Ultimately, what I'm most scared of is

ruining myself for people, but I have not

been managing my impulse as well.

You need to know that my words are mine.

I don't think that this hasn't been true,

but I've been moving so fast that my own

process isn't actually clear to me and I

want to have it be a

guarantee moving forward.

What I can't guarantee though is that we

will agree about this

technology or what to do with it.

I think that's good.

We need a lot of kinds of folks

critiquing this technology.

I'm not a pure AI hater, which people in

the AI industry know.

So when I say that the way these models

were trained deeply disturbs

me, that lands differently.

When I say that I think that the speed at

which these companies are trying to

consolidate economic power should freak

everyone in the world,

that's coming from

someone who has "nuance takes."

When I say I worry about the climate

impacts of this rollout, that is not me

saying I don't think

this text should ever exist.

It's me saying for God's sake, please

don't make our biggest problem worse.

It's very likely that you, the reader,

and I disagree on how or

even whether AI should be used.

I think it makes sense for that

disagreement to exist.

But I have also always believed that my

audience is more likely

to be right than I am.

You know what this

feels like in a way I can't.

And I'm so sorry for diluting myself in

this way and harming the

thing we've all built together.

As for the "why don't you just make less,

no one is making you do this,"

I'm not sure that's how I work.

I can hear Hank saying this.

I've been feeling the pressure of "oh, I

have this little video idea, I need to

get it out real fast so I can get to the

more important stuff," and I create when

I feel that pressure.

But making more things does

not make me make better things.

It does not make the big thing that I've

been doing for 20 years better.

I know that I can manage

myself more effectively.

I want to make videos like the one I made

yesterday on Hank's channel, where the

writing was the whole thing, and I felt

it all the way down.

I've been so enriched by

people's responses to it.

And sure, I'm probably going to make

dumb, unscripted, straight-to-camera

thought videos sometimes.

And then I'll play connections.

But mostly I need to come to terms with

the fact that the level of dopamine I'm

getting from interacting with language

learning models, with doing more and more

and more and more, is not healthy for me

or good for the world.

It is careless and has disconnected me

from where people are on this.

I was talking about this with Catherine

last night, and she

did not pull any punches.

Frankly, neither did John.

Neither of them think

I've been being healthy.

I need to readjust.

So, what changes?

Expect less Hank's channel.

I may need to pause for a while.

It may be that Hank's channel comes back

with writing and research support.

It may be that it comes back

with just way fewer videos.

I'm going to spend this time finishing a

video I've been working on for ages that

I think really, really matters.

Two, smoosh and

four-by-three are getting pause as well.

If there are bugs, there are bugs.

I have a backlog of four-by-three boards

right now, and frankly, writing them is

usually a solace to me.

But if we run out, I'm not

going to worry about that.

So, if it just reverts to a static board

one day, that'll be that.

I do deeply want to support GoodStore and

Complexly in whatever way I can.

So, there may be some stuff on that

front, but the reliance on me has always

been risky, so we need

to build for that as well.

I'm very sorry for harming

the thing this is all based on.

Interesting, because it's like

he's saying he did not use chat GPT in

the way that he's being accused, but he's

recognizing that his over-reliant and use

of chat GPT is creating a synaptic

feedback loop in his brain that his brain

quite likes, that he's becoming—he

didn't say these words, but it seems like

he's becoming addicted to,

and he needs to make a change.

And he also knows that his wife—I think

that's his wife, Catherine, if I

understand that correctly—his brother

John has said, "Hey, this—what you're

doing is not healthy."

There's a lot to unpack here.

But the first thing I

just want to say is,

my heart goes out to anyone

that might be in this position.

AI is a tantalizing tool.

It's a powerful tool.

It can do a couple of cool things,

like very fast transfer of information,

not accurate information, not good

information, just fast.

And if

you're a content creator, which is what

Hank Green is, and I guess technically I

am now, but I'm in

a—I'm not even close.

It can be tempting to just make more and

make more and make more and make more,

and whatever way you can help make that

process more efficient, faster,

streamline it so you can

satisfy demand and make more.

And

it's right there.

It's cheap.

Why not do it?

I don't blame the content creator who's

stuck entrenched in the game for taking

that path, especially when they're in it,

because they don't feel like

they have any other choice.

Really.

We had to, at Zero Dot, we had to make a

couple of choices on that front.

I was

in my role at Zero Dot

when it was just three of us.

I was kind of the business guy.

I didn't like that I was the business

guy, but it seemed like I was the one

that was keeping my hands on everything

to make sure that we were going to strive

to make the Zero Dot podcast, Zero Dot

media, some kind of entity that wasn't

just going to like drown,

whatever that meant.

I felt it was my moral responsibility

to ensure that Zero Dot

was quote unquote profitable.

I felt it was my moral responsibility

that if I didn't do everything in my

power that was reasonable to fulfill that

promise that I was doing wrong by then

John and then and now Daniel.

I thought I was doing the right thing and

I don't think I did anything AI specific,

but I don't think I ever wrote off AI in

the same way that I'm writing AI off now.

Like I don't think I was against using

AI, a learning language model to help

give me an outline of an episode.

I think I used AI a few times and hey,

give me a bunch of ideas for podcast

names because we were struggling with

that and none of them were very good, but

they spurred me to think of my own ideas.

I didn't say no to AI when I'm like, ah,

you know, what's a good format for a show

or what are some topics

people are talking about?

I think I searched some

things here and there.

I want to tell you that I think I

discarded most of them,

but this is the problem when you do

something like this and you use AI.

Once you know something, you can't

completely discard it.

You can't completely get rid of it in

your brain and your language.

So yes, I think I did my due diligence,

but I still used it.

I still consume tons of water.

That's what these data centers are doing,

consuming tons of resources and water

just to feed me my prompts.

I still did harm.

I used AI on a couple occasions.

This isn't a blast against Riverside, but

they advertise an idea of giving you an

AI thumbnail generator.

I use that to get an idea of

what a good thumbnail would be.

I did all of this.

Probably pissing off our art director,

Daniel, in the process.

I wasn't trying to

tell Daniel what to do.

I wasn't trying to

make him do anything a way

that he wasn't happy with.

I thought, though, that as the "business

advisor guy" it was my job to be on the

lookout for making sure we were making

money in this thing.

That was my goal.

We have to make sure we're

turning some kind of profit.

We're seeing some kind of momentum.

I want to make sure that I'm not...

I asked John and Daniel to take this

massive leap with me and

this podcast venture with me.

I didn't want to waste their time.

I want to make sure they saw something

come through with it.

We

had a lot of violent discussions and a

lot of disagreements.

I learned a couple things over a period

of time, a couple months, which was

I wasn't liking the things we were making

under this lens of whatever AI was

funneling me towards.

Even if I told myself I

discredited most of it.

And if none of us was making something we

were 100% proud of and wanted to make,

then what was even the point?

It took me a while to learn that lesson.

I'm embarrassed by

that if I'm being honest.

But I'm glad I did.

When I finally learned that lesson,

I got my hands out of the pot.

I stopped micromanaging and Daniel became

the art guy full on.

And just was like, you make whatever the

fuck you want to make.

I make it the best thing you want to make

as long as you feel good about it.

That was the only goal.

And I love every single one of the

thumbnails he's made.

All of our art, all of our logo.

I love every single thing he's made.

And I'm happy that we made that decision.

I'm happy we stepped away from

Riverside's AI soft editing software.

I'm happy that we decided to make more

specific changes to how the

show worked towards the end.

And I'm happy that towards the end of our

shorts making ventures, we said, no, we

don't want to do any of this AI stuff.

We want to make our own shorts or we want

to just stop making them all together

until we can make

something we're proud of.

And we're still doing this.

Like we're still evolving.

So I totally resonate and get

with Hank's position and I appreciate his

humility and I appreciate his want to be

straightforward and

honest with how he's feeling.

And I appreciate his vulnerability.

I mean, those are all

things I can appreciate.

But if it's okay,

I mean, it isn't because

Hank Green isn't here.

I want to offer advice to anyone that's

in a Hank Green like

position in this specific scenario.

Using AI and recognizing you're using too

much of it, recognizing you've got a

dopamine fix on it and the one comment

that he makes in this post that's really,

really, really important.

Right

here.

When people say, why

don't you make less things?

Because that seems

like the solution here.

I'm not sure that's how I work.

I've been feeling the pressure of, oh, I

had this little video idea.

I need to get it out real fast so I can

get to the more important stuff and I

create when I feel that pressure.

Just needing that kind of pressure cooker

approach to making stuff.

Recognizing that making constantly

doesn't allow you to focus on the bigger

things you want to be making.

But also recognizing that maybe that's

how your brain operates.

Keeping all that in mind.

If you were telling me the same thing

that Hank was saying to me, I'd say to

you, it sounds like you are incredibly

uncomfortable with something about

yourself that you're avoiding.

And I don't know what that is.

Do you know what that is?

The way I'm reading this is it sounds

like Hank is a very

high performing achiever.

By that I mean he's able to be high

functioning amidst all the

stuff going on in his life.

And if he's happy doing that and there's

no chaos to your family and you're able

to find some kind of homeostasis and, you

know, screw me, I got nothing to say.

But it sounds like there's

something to be said here.

It sounds like the over-reliance of

learning language models, whether it's

for research or scripting or whatever, is

a result of feeling this pressure to

constantly make something.

And it sounds like he's taking that

appropriate step back to

do that, which is good.

My question would be, where's that

pressure coming from?

Who is telling you you

have to do all of this?

Because when I go back to my story about

the pressure I was putting on myself, the

only person that was

telling me to do that was me.

I was the one accepting

the moral responsibility.

I was the one that thought that I would

do whatever it took to make

sure things were successful.

But John didn't care

and Daniel didn't care.

They were just happy we were doing it.

And I ran into a real wall where I

thought, you know what?

If I keep going down this path,

I might not push, not just push them

away, but they might be like, I don't

want to do this anymore.

And that was the whole point is that we'd

want to do this together.

I'm really lucky that I caught that as

early as I did because I could not have.

I almost didn't, but I'm glad I did.

And

I realized I was afraid.

I was afraid of letting people down.

I was afraid of being less.

I was afraid of an expectation held for

me that no one actually had for me, but I

thought maybe they did.

that was like making fun of your podcast

because you're calling it

humans and it was audio only.

And your your theming was black and

yellow and our theming was black and

yellow and our slogan was team human and

we were going audio

only for a little bit.

I was making fun of you for a minute, but

we never posted it and I'm not going to.

I want you to know that I

see one of the good ones.

This is a I

don't I was about to

say this is a stumble.

It's not really even a stumble.

It's I love the fact that you

are seeing

the dissatisfaction your community that

you have created has caused and holding

that to yourself and go assist the values

that I want to espouse.

I'm a little afraid that there might be

an element of you being so afraid of

disappointing people that you have you

hold up the people's expectations to such

a steam that it might be it might result

in burnout and breaking you.

I say as a as someone who's not quite a

friend, but if I was your friend I'd love

to be your friend and

that's what I would say to you.

I'm worried about that.

And I'm not here to

talk about AI versus not.

I think there's a lot of there's probably

topics on that you

and I would disagree on.

What I am saying though is that.

When people see the

real you the sloppy you

the um's does.

They resonate more.

I think you have this amazing and

incredible style where

it's like everything is cut.

There's no breathing room and that's

because of the algorithm in the space and

I get that I really do.

But we've actually made a conscious

effort here to leave a lot of that

breathing and a lot of that talk and all

that space to exist in the podcast.

Our transitions are longer than they

probably should be just to

give things life and breath.

And if the algorithm

doesn't like that okay.

That's okay.

We're okay with that.

We've accepted that cost.

And I wonder what benefit you have if you

did something similar in all the ways in

which you thought you couldn't accept

that cost but maybe you could.

And that's to anyone in Hank's position.

We're not infallible.

We're all human beings.

But Hank can I you're not listening to

this but if we were talking can I just

say something to you.

I think I saw a Reddit comment say this

too so it's not even truly my original

idea but I'm kind of relieved that you've

been using a lot of AI

because I watch all of your stuff.

You make a lot of stuff and I'm like how

does this guy do this.

I mean yeah I have a full-time job and

Daniel has a job and

I do what I can in my free time.

Sure there's elements of that and you

might have a team behind you and such and

this is your thing but like you have your

hands in so many different pots and

you're still making it

making it and you don't stop.

That when I got a whiff that maybe AI is

doing a lot more

heavy lifting than you've

ever truly been open and implied about.

I know your policy

I've seen that but like

when I got that little whiff I'm like oh

I feel a little bit better about myself

and I wonder

if all of this is a gentle beautiful gift

in reminding you that maybe you should

match the pace of the avatar of yourself

you want others to follow

as opposed to trying to race to some kind

of invisible visage and

idol that doesn't even exist.

I wonder

in any case

I wish you good well Hank Green.

You'll get out of this you'll be fine.

Maybe someday we'll have a nice chat

about this stuff but in the meantime

keep fighting a good fight.

(Music)

We start wrapping things up.

We have just one more thing I want to

talk to you all about as

is popular tradition here

at Zero Dot.

Focus on life issues and life things and

do blind reacts to people's

questions and comments on Reddit.

Now usually as a leadership consultant we

focus on leadership stuff but I thought

it'd be better to talk about just life

stuff if we possibly could just

generalized life stuff and so with that

let's dive into the literal

Reddit life section just posted 57

minutes ago this person says

should I get a second bachelor's degree

to redo my college experience?

Hmm

interesting

redo my college experience so you've

already done it you

want to redo it let's see.

I graduated college two years ago so

you've had your degree for two years.

Started during the pandemic I went to a

college that had really strict rules and

didn't get a good start to my college

life because of quarantine.

Oh yeah okay I can see that.

I also come from an abusive home that

kind of ruined it further.

Oof okay okay I never really made friends

or joined clubs and although I know that

time is long gone I

wonder if I should go back.

I know I can't redo it and the people in

college are younger than me so I can't

really be friends with them.

I want to go back to

network and find myself.

Something that my abusive family didn't

let me do and kept me home.

Here's the question wait

something that my abusive family

didn't let me do and kept me home okay.

Here's the question I graduated undergrad

with a psych bachelor's

and a 4.0 GPA with no loans.

Oh wow good for you so you

don't owe any debt that's great.

I do want to switch careers.

If I get a second bachelor's I would want

to switch to business though

accounting or supply chain.

The other option is to get

a master's in one of those.

I feel like my life never started despite

the fact it's been years since college

started and now two years since it ended.

So should I go back to get a second

bachelor's in a new career I want and

also try to make it up for what I lost or

getting master's in

the new career I want.

Any advice is much appreciated thank you.

And the one comment we have here is hell

yeah you should bonus points if you get

someone else to pay for it.

Are you employed?

Good question to ask.

Good question to ask.

All right this is good.

You're you want to get a second

opportunity to have that same experience.

That's a kind of a beautiful thing and I

don't want to poo-poo that.

I do feel the need to talk about and kind

of give some expression to some myths

that you might be holding on to that

won't be true and you won't find out

until you've already spent all the harder

money and done the thing.

You'll never be able to recreate what a

college experience would have been like

in the moment in time that

you're trying to replace.

It's just not going to happen.

You're a different person and you said it

they'll be a lot younger than you so that

camaraderie is going to be different.

There's going to be

this age displacement.

There's a little bit of distance between

you and them that you'll never be able to

truly sandwich together.

And so you'll be frustrated by the fact

that you're trying to use this as a way

to give yourself a second chance but the

experience will never match

whatever you had in your head.

I'm not saying don't do this.

I'm saying what is your purpose in doing

this beyond networking and feeling like

you can relive this part of your life?

And the answer probably is you don't know

and I don't know either.

You probably get a very unusual

experience but kind of

a cool experience too.

If you can afford it and pay for it like

the person said below you that you have a

career you have a job that'll do some of

it that might dictate whether you get a

bachelor's or a master's.

Once you get one bachelor's you can

absolutely get a master's

for a curriculum, criteria, genre, a

piece of education that is not related to

your current bachelor's.

Those programs exist.

I won't advise more on that

but that is always possibility.

And if your goal is upwards trajectory

that might not be a bad idea.

You want to switch to business,

accounting or supply chain.

That's interesting because

you have a psych bachelor's.

You want to go to business

and you use the words switch.

I would think you'd want to think of it

like you're adding to.

You're adding

to what you already know.

You have a bachelor's understanding and

you have a business understanding but you

are using the language as if you don't

even like that you have a

psych bachelor's degree.

And that would be a mistake.

I would want to think about how you can

use your psych bachelor's in a way that

enhances whatever business

avenue you want to go into

and really make yourself marketable and

unique in that particular space.

Now I'm not going to tell

you what to go for here.

I will say

there's a lot of people in accounting.

There's a lot of people in supply chain.

A lot of people with those degrees and a

lot of those people are

struggling right now to get jobs.

So what I would say,

I'm not trying to tell

you what to do not to do.

I would say your

reason raison de etre,

your modus operandi,

whatever you want to say.

Your reason for doing this has to be

either guaranteed that's going to give

you job satisfaction and it's going to be

a career you or you think

there's a market for it.

Now you never know if there's going to be

market for it because by two to four to

three years you never

know what's going to happen.

So I would say it has to be something

that really motivates you,

compels you, and you love it.

But answer your question.

I can't answer the question only you can.

What motivates you?

What's your why?

And how do you think this shapes that

will shape you to be the

person you want to become?

And along the way you'll get that

college, some kind of

college facsimile experience.

Who knows what it will actually look and

feel like you might be

really surprised by the results.

But who's the person you want to be and

why and have that motivate you?

Is it tied to your job?

Is it not tied to your job?

And how can you not treat the past four

years you did as like, we'll switch and

we're just going to dismiss it and trade

and act like you can just

add to what you currently know.

I think that'll create a lot more

satisfaction with yourself,

satisfaction within your life.

And I

think you'd be really proud of yourself.

So

that's my advice to you.

You didn't ask for it, but

I wish you the best.

Cheers my guy.

That has been our show here, another

episode of the Counter-Hit.

What did you like?

What didn't you like?

We're going to have shows every single

week talking about all different kinds of

topics from human issues, global issues,

arts issues, video game issues, and

everything in between.

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Daniel Pradley is our co-founder in the

background making all of

this happen for you all.

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Until next time,

stay human.

Cheers.